Inside George Miller’s 20-Year Quest To Make ‘Three Thousand Years Of Longing’, As ‘Furiosa’ Revs Her Engines – Cannes

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George Miller is distracted. Five minutes into our meeting, he begs forgiveness to take a quick call. And then, on an iPad tilted in his direction, the filmmaker watches as a camera feed from the Australian outback offers him a live view of a pre-shoot for his next feature, Furiosa.

His supervising stunt coordinator and second unit director, Guy Norris, whose work with Miller stretches back to 1981’s Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior, is already shooting sequences for the new film.Set 15 years before the events of Mad Max: Fury Road, the film will tell the backstory of Charlize Theron’s enigmatic Furiosa, this time played by Anya Taylor-Joy. “Here I am doing an interview with you halfway across the world, and I’m able to look at this footage being shot far west from where I am and we’re discussing it as we go through the process,” says Miller, marveling at the technology. “It’s amazing, really.”It has been seven years since Fury Road established itself as the most innovative and exciting blockbuster in decades, earning six Oscars from 10 nominations.

Miller was nominated for Best Director and the film for Best Picture. And now here he is, on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, where he will premiere his next feature — the film he shot in-between — Three Thousand Years of Longing, perhaps suggesting that Miller’s movies can be likened to that old adage about buses: you wait forever for one to come along only for two to stack up in quick succession.Miller has described Three Thousand Years of Longing as the “opposite” of Fury Road — an “anti-Mad Max” — and in many ways, he’s correct.

It is dialogue-driven; a lingering two-hander in which a scholar on a trip to a speaking engagement in Istanbul inadvertently summons a Djinn